OT: A browser question.

"Dave Plowman (News)" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

How ancient is this laptop? Might be worth trying a more recent Windows -

A quick google suggests Phoenix might be worth a look -

Opera is said to be a very fast, relatively small browser.

Have you installed anti-virus software and an anti-spyware package?

Viruses and, especially, spyware could be at the root of the problem.

Have you tried an older version of FF? I use a 98 laptop with V1.5 - works a treat.

Regards,

May be dodgy RAM, Dave

If its go 1/2 gig of RAM go linux, but run memtest first.

Might still be a bit much if Dave thinks current FF is a bit much, but you can still get hold of old versions

I was using something like 3.6 on Win95 in a P12o

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Plowman (News)" saying something like:

Various versions of old stuff here, more in keeping with the old thing.

What's the spec on it? (memory/CPU speed/disk size)

Are you tied to Windows for any reason, or could you run a different OS?

cheers

Jules

Since I use it in the main PC I wondered about that and tried to find older versions without success.

or for that matter anti-virus software - on an old machine it will grind to a halt with modern AV packages (having said that - most don't support

run that. Be careful visiting dodgy sites though since every exploit known to man will be unpatched! (keep Java and Javascript turned off where you can as well)

What version of IE are you using? If its version 5.5 then that may be the problem try downloading version 6 from

You can still obtain the security updates for Version 6 (and Windows 98 SE) from the Microsoft Windows Update page - and that may resolve your problems.

Cash

Take yer pick!

The Antivirus products that exclude scanning for spyware should be still useful in some defence even for an old machine and don't have the software load of the more recent do everything suites. The free version of avast! is supported on Windows 95, and is low footprint I've heard (I use AVG)

I *really* couldn't be bothered with yet another OS...

Alternatively,

If your main machine is capable of it (XP Pro and above), you could open a RDP session to it using a terminal server client (downloadable free from MS for all client OS versions including 98SE). Or one of the many versions of VNC.

Then you can use the laptop as a window on to your main machine (running whatever you like - other than video apps) and still drag files off it, if you have mapped file shares in common.

Regarding the machine doing IE; IE can be a memory hog loading up many megabytes and doing nothing for it. This may be an amount past the physical memory in the machine (64MB, 128MB?) chewed up by everything else - and the excess request may be hammering the disc cache instead. A dodgy sector there could bring the whole house of cards flying down.

You could consider Google chrome